How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team
Posted in Interpersonal, Leadership on 22. Sep, 2009
This past week the Harvard Business Blog shared an excellent article highlighting effective tips for mitigating the toxic (and sadly, often pervasive) influence of pessimists on a team. The article is worth reading in its entirety, so I won’t try to summarize the whole thing here.
As I know many of you know, pessimistic griping CAN have a role to play, and it certainly can help a team bond quickly in the face of a common enemy (good example: a basic training drill instructor). Overall though, it’s definitely a negative force that needs to be contained because of it’s contagious nature and propensity to spread quickly. Bad attitudes tend to breed more bad attitudes, and it’s much easier to prevent the downward spiral to begin with than to recover from an attitudinal tailspin. I’m all for healthy cynicism, but that’s a special breed of pessimism (or is it realism?) and the subject of a post for another day. So I’ll leave it there and share a few the key principles worth noting:
Principles to Remember
Do:
- Find the source of the pessimism
- Differentiate between the person and the behavior
- Involve the whole team in setting norms for team behavior
Don’t:
- Single someone out in front of the whole group
- Allow negative comments to go unaddressed
- Assume all pessimism is unproductive
What about you? Do you succumb to pessimism yourself? Are there other good techniques you’ve found for containing the spread?
-Trey
How to Handle the Pessimist on Your Team [The Harvard Business Blog]
Related posts:
